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Putin, in Need of Cohesion, Pushes Patriotism

MOSCOW — Over 12 years as the principal leader of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin has brought the same ruthless pragmatism to a wide range of problems — separatist wars, gas wars, rebellious oligarchs and a collapsing ruble.

Now he is facing a problem he has never encountered before, one that is an awkward fit with his skeptical, K.G.B.-trained mind. Six months into his third presidential term, after a wave of unsettling street protests, Mr. Putin needs an ideology — some idea powerful enough to consolidate the country around his rule.

One of the few clear strategies to emerge in recent months is an effort to mobilize conservative elements in society. Cossack militias are being revived, regional officials are scrambling to present “patriotic education” programs and Slavophile discussion clubs have opened in major cities under the slogan “Give us a national idea!”

“Definitely he is thinking about ideology,” Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s press secretary and close aide, said in an interview. “Ideology is very important. Patriotism is very important. Without dedication from people, without the trust of people, you cannot expect a positive impact of what you are doing, of your job.”

Ideas are changing inside the ruling class, as well. The pro-Western, modernizing doctrine of President Dmitri A. Medvedev has been replaced by talk about “post-democracy” and imperial nostalgia. Leading intellectuals are challenging the premise, driven into this country 20 years ago, that Russia should seek to emulate liberal Western institutions. “Western values” are spoken of with disdain.

Every year, scholars from around the world gather for a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, where they sit around an opulent dinner table, peppering Mr. Putin with questions for hours. Mr. Peskov said this year there were few questions about democracy and human rights — because those questions are no longer of interest.

“World experts nowadays are losing their interest in the traditional set of burning points,” he said. “Everyone is sick and tired of this issue of human rights.”

He added, “It’s boringly traditional, boringly traditional, and it’s not on the agenda.”

Events of the last year have breathed life into this anti-Western argument. The debt crisis stripped the euro zone of its attraction as an economic model, and then as a political one. The Arab uprisings have left Russia and the United States divided by an intellectual chasm. The Russian Orthodox Church casts the West as unleashing dangerous turbulence on the world.

Mr. Peskov said that Mr. Putin “understands pretty well that there are no general Western values,” but that he views this as a period of severe historic crisis.

“We have a tremendous collapse of cultures in Europe, less in the States, less in South America,” Mr. Peskov said. “But we have it in Africa and we have it in Europe, and they will be torn apart by these contradictions. Because there is no harmony in coexistence of different cultures, they cannot ensure this harmony.”

“The wave of revolutions in Maghreb, in the Middle East, in the Gulf, in Yemen, it brought disaster,” he said.

While Russia has no intention of drifting from the West in its foreign policy and seeks closer bilateral relationships, Mr. Peskov said, it will no longer tolerate interference by outsiders in its domestic affairs.

This message is unambiguous, but it is difficult to know what concrete changes it may bring in a country whose top political and business figures have homes in Western Europe and send their children to study there.

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin on June 12 in Moscow during a Russia Day ceremony.Credit
Alexey Druzhinin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In September, during a discussion on “nationalizing the elite,” a Kremlin-connected lawmaker proposed barring officials from owning property overseas, saying it makes them beholden to foreign governments and could lead them to betray Russia. The proposal met open resistance, including from Mr. Medvedev, and is now in limbo.

Mr. Peskov said Mr. Putin had mixed feelings about the measure and had not come to a final decision about it.

“If you work for the state — if you are a state employee of a certain level especially — and you have your investment outside, you can be easily influenced from that outside, and it can harm the interests of the state,” he said. “You are not safe, in terms of being firm in defending the state’s interests. But on the other hand, if we are speaking about abroad, it is much cheaper to buy a flat somewhere in Bulgaria than here in Moscow. So there is a huge discussion about that.”

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Alexander Rahr, one of the experts who attended the Valdai Discussion Club, said he left with the sense that though Mr. Putin has benefited politically by embracing more conservative language, there is something deeper going on.

“He is preparing Russians more and more for the understanding that Russia does not belong to the West, to Western culture anymore, or to Europe in the way that was discussed during the 1990s,” said Mr. Rahr, the author of a biography of Mr. Putin. “He is preparing Russians for something else. Whatever this means is very difficult to say.”

In public, Mr. Putin has lent his voice to the search for patriotic ideas. At a September meeting that started a national push for “patriotic education,” he said that conflict over “cultural identity, spiritual and moral values and moral codes” had become a field of intense battle between Russia and its foes.

“This is not some kind of phobia, it really is happening,” Mr. Putin said, according to the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. “This is at least one of the forms of competitive battles that many countries encounter, just like the battle for mineral resources. Distortion of the national, historic and moral consciousness more than once led the whole state to weakness, collapse and loss of sovereignty.”

That theme was reprised this month, on the 400th anniversary of the uprising that expelled a Polish-Lithuanian occupation, ending what Russians call the “time of troubles.”

The message seemed tailored for this suspicious season, when nonprofit groups that receive financing from outside Russia are being labeled “foreign agents” and the legal definition of treason has been broadened to include providing assistance to international organizations. In a videotaped lecture that will be shown in high school classrooms, one of Mr. Putin’s close allies, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, describes the long ago Western occupiers to the accompaniment of dark orchestral music and images of a dead village girl, blazing wood cabins and a cowering child.

On orders from Moscow, Russia’s state officials are scrambling to come up with their own patriotic programs. In Rostov-on-Don, the Ministry of Education is considering imperial-style 19th-century costume balls. Officials in Novosibirsk proposed a new holiday, “The Day of Overcoming the Troubles.” Volgograd legislators inaugurated a Commission on Questions of Patriotic Education, Ideology and Propaganda.

Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said he believed that Russia would spend several years in a search for “a unifying set of ideas” under Mr. Putin’s leadership.

“He is a very good operational thinker — he is practical — but at certain points you have to offer a vision,” Mr. Karaganov said. “It is clear what is happening now is the rebuilding of Russia’s ties with its history, which were broken.”

One complication in that project, he noted, is that Russia’s moments of glory and unity have always been associated with an invading force.

“Russia has a fantastic, very strange and very foreign situation — the country has no enemies,” he said. “Your country was formed by a few words in your Constitution. Our country was formed around defense, and all of a sudden there is no threat.”

Anna Kordunsky contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 21, 2012, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Putin, in Need of Cohesion, Pushes Patriotism. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe